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William Johanson
10-01-2007, 6:12 PM
Greetings all, I am new to your forum and I want to first say thanks for all of the Ideas. I have recently purchased a M500 Chinese Laser and am having some trouble. I purchased it off of Ebay brand new with supposed guarantees and support but I am afraid I may have made a mistake. I have tried to set up some support but it has not worked out yet and now the Chinese are on a "holiday" for the next week and I don't really want to wait that long. I am familiar with Laser systems. I recently sold an LMI (now Preco) engraving laser and work with large cutting lasers all day at my Day job. Anyway, I have everything set up, The beam aligned and it works for vector cutting. When I try to Raster I just get a bunch of random dots and usually outside of the area it is supposed to engrave. I push the test button and it "dry runs" a rectangle around the area correctly but when I run it all I get are random dots. Also I have noticed when I push the "Datum" button the laser head moves to the upper right corner. The limit switch for the Y-axis is on the upper side so that works correctly but the limit switch for the x-axis is on the left side but the head move to the right hits the hard stop and keeps trying to run until I push "stop". I don't know if these are related but I am stumped. Any Ideas out there? If someone could help it would be greatly appreciated.

Kim Vellore
10-01-2007, 6:48 PM
The only time I had dots was I was trying to make them by having very low frequency (PPI) and max speed.

Kim

pete hagan
10-01-2007, 8:36 PM
William,

These problems are very typical of people used to much more sophisticated machines. First we need more info to try and help.

Brand of laser with manufacture's web link if possible
configuration wattage, control cards etc...

Software! what are you using?

If you are using lasercut 50 then many of these other brands are using the same product. If you are sending the laserjob like a print job within other applications then we need to know that as well.

You could event post the file you are trying to cut / engrave and many here will try to help debug the system with you.

So try and document exactly what when how where and why so we can investigate further..

Welcome to the Creek!

Pete

William Johanson
10-01-2007, 8:57 PM
Thanks a million for giving it a shot. First some info:

Manufacture: Redsailcutters.com
Model: M500
Software: Lasercut 5.0 USB I have tried both Corel and Universal edition

I have tried several files. Mainly just some simple shapes and text drawn in corel. I open a laseroutput window in Corel and output file to the laser. The file loads into the laser and I push Test. The laser head tracks a small rectangle and everything looks good. Sometimes the laser raster back and forth in the intended work area just making random dots. Other times the laser head actually moves about 2-3" left and down and does the same thing just random dots. I am at home now not in front of the laser so I don't know what else I can tell you. If you need any more info to help diagnose my problem just let me know. thanks again,

William Johanson
10-02-2007, 3:19 PM
UPDATE - Well I finally got this machine to raster. Pretty stupid on my part. The default speed that came on the software was too fast. When I turned down the speed the raster started working. Now I have a couple more software related questions. As I stated before the software I am using is Lasercut 5.0 Corel edition.

#1 - In the laser output window how do you get the advanced setting button to become available? In my software manual it just says to click it but it is not activated for some reason.

#2 - My previous laser system worked thru the print driver. A Hairline red line was vector, any gray or black line or image was raster. On this software I tried making an oval, Made the line 2 point black w/ no fill and sent it to the laser. I expected the laser to etch just the black line with no fill but it engraved the entire oval. Then I added some text to the inside of the oval and sent that to the laser. The outcome was the Oval was etched except for where the text was which was left not engrave, Exact opposite of what I was trying for. I am not understanding how this works. How would I get the laser to etch an oval shape but just etch the line not the entire oval?

Thanks again,

Bill

Niklas Bjornestal
10-04-2007, 3:56 PM
Anyone knows if the lasercut 50 software would work with a RedSail RS3040 laser?